London Labour and the London Poor - Volume 1 by Henry Mayhew (1812 - 1887).

Subtitled, "A Cyclopaedia of the condition and earnings of those that will work, those that cannot work, and those that will not work."

"The history of a people from the lips of the people themselves .. their labour, earnings, trials and sufferings, in their own unvarnished language, and to pourtray the condition of their homes and their families by personal observation of the places ..." "My earnest hope is that the book may serve to give the rich a more intimate knowledge of the sufferings, and the frequent heroism under those sufferings, of the poor ..."

Henry Mayhew was a social researcher and journalist; he compiled a four volume work in minute detail on the lives of the poor in London, of which this is the first volume, published in 1851.

Notes:
1 Section 34 consists of an analysis of the data collected on the street sellers of eatables and drinkables. Mayhew himself implies that it might not be too interesting for some of his readers. Listeners could miss out this section without fear that they are missing too much.
2 The word "blank" has been inserted into the reading where expletives and proper names are given in the text as, for example, "D---d", or "Mrs M---", which have been read as "D blank D" and "Mrs M blank".
3 There are some pages of errata at the end of the book, which mainly involve corrections to the many numbers given in the text. The corrections have been included in the recording. However, many arithmetical errors still exist; these have been left unchanged.
4 "ing-uns" are frequently mentioned as being sold by the costermongers. This is clarified on page 94 of the text as being their name for onions.
5 A quartern loaf weighed four pounds.
6 A "pottle" is a volume of half a gallon (four pints).
7 "Women (or girls) of the town" was a euphemism for prostitutes.

IMPORTANT - soloist, please note: in order to limit the amount of languishing projects (and hence the amount of files on our hard-pressed server), we ask that you post an update at least once a month in your project thread, even if you haven't managed to record anything. If we don't hear from you for three months, your project may be opened up to a group project if a Book Coordinator is found. Files you have completed will be used in this project. If you haven't recorded anything yet, your project will be removed from the forum (contact any admin to see if it can be re-instated).Please don't download or listen to files belonging to projects in process (unless you are the BC or PL). Our servers are not set up to handle the greater volume of traffic. Please wait until the project has been completed. Thanks!

The reader will record the following at the beginning and end of each file:
No more than 0.5 to 1 second of silence at the beginning of the recording!START of recording (Intro):

"Section [number] of London Labour and the London Poor, by Henry Mayhew - Volume 1. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit: librivox DOT org"

This is an enormous project; I estimate about 47 hours of recording. There is a short book on archive.org that extracts interesting bits from the first three volumes of Mayhew's series (it's called "Mayhew's London"), but unfortunately it was compiled quite recently.

Peter

"Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist." Kenneth Boulding, 1973

I was puzzled exactly what "viz" meant, so I checked, and thought that I'd try to keep to a specific definition for it and other Latin abbreviations. I can't remember where I got the "and so on" definition for "&c". When I just looked it up, you're right. But Mayhew uses both "etc" and "&c", so I just now thought I'd go on handling them slightly differently. ... it's either that, or go back through the file that's uploading now!

EDIT: Section 1 uploaded.

Peter

"Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist." Kenneth Boulding, 1973